Home / Printers

RSS Feeds

News | Forum | Store

Brother DCP-J140W review

1 of 4

Gallery

Verdict:

The DCP-J140W is cheap, but it's also slow to print and expensive to run

Review Date: 13 Jul 2012

Price when reviewed: £50

Buy it now for: £58
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.lambda-tek.com

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

User Rating

Brother makes a truly daunting range of inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFPs), of which the DCP-J140W is one of the cheapest. An entry-level model aimed at micro businesses, it can handle basic prints, scans and copies, but there's no fax facility.

There are a couple of other features missing when compared to devices further up Brother's range. There's no automatic document feeder for unattended multi-page copying and the printer doesn't support automatic duplex (double-sided) printing. It's also one of comparatively few models without a memory card reader for making direct photo prints, but we've never been convinced that this is a necessary feature on a business machine.

The DCP-J140W is a squat device that can connect to a single PC via a USB connection, or be joined to a wireless network for sharing among several users. With just a simple LCD display and up/down keys, entering a network passkey is a little bit of a fumble, but it's otherwise easy to set up. The 100-sheet paper input tray seems more robust than we've seen on some of Brother's other printers, and it coped perfectly with a stack of paper which we had stored so awkwardly that it had developed a pronounced curve.

Brother claims that the DCP-J140W can print up to 33 black pages per minute (ppm) or 27 in colour, but the 5ipm figure obtained with the ISO/IEC 24734 test gives a more accurate impression; that of a rather slow printer. The fastest rate we timed was 13.4ppm when producing 25 pages of draft text, but at the normal print quality this dropped to just 5.4ppm. Colour graphics edged out at just 3.7ppm, while postcard-sized borderless photos took more than two and a half minutes each.

Unfortunately the quality was nothing special. On plain paper, black and coloured inks lacked impact and black text had a slightly approximate outline, revealing at a glance that it came from an inkjet. While photo prints were also nothing special, they were more than adequate for occasional use.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

User Reviews

See more DCP-J140W reviews on Reevoo.com

Best Prices

Price comparison powered by

Prices, delivery and availability at 4 retailers		Go
	£58	Go
	£58	Go
	£60	Go
	£62	Go

< Previous Reviews : Printers Next >

Sponsored Links

User comments

Fiction?

"Based on the manufacturers' yield figures..."

Since you have already established that the manufacturer's figures are a work of fiction as regards print speeds, why now do you place any credance on them for ink yields?

Do your job - review the wretched thing, don't just spout manufacturer claims. If I wanted manufacturer claims I would go to the manufacturer's website, not yours!

By dalerm on 13 Jul 2012

Hi Dalerm,

The headline speed figures quoted in the article (33ppm mono/27ppm colour) are obtained by Brother using proprietary tests designed to show their printer in the best possible light. This used to be common practice among manufacturers, but since 2009 there has been an ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 24732) specifically for the purpose of comparing the speed of printers. As we wrote in the review, Brother also publishes a figure – 5ipm – obtained using this far more realistic test. This quite closely reflects our test results of 5.4ppm mono and 3.7ppm colour.

Regarding page yields, all inkjet manufacturers now quote figures that are obtained in accordance with the ISO/IEC 24711 test specification, which was introduced in 2006 and updated the following year. As with ISO/IEC 24732, this standard was specifically introduced to provide a consistent approach between manufacturers and third-party testers, allowing more realistic figures that could be compared between different manufacturers' products.

ISO/IEC 24711 requires the use of at least three printers, each of which is primed before being fitted with new cartridges and being left to repeatedly print the associated ISO/IEC 24712 suite of test documents. Exhausted cartridges are replaced, the number of pages they printed is noted, and the printer continues until the next cartridge is spent. This test pattern continues until each of the ink cartridges in each of the printers has been replaced a minimum of three times, after which the results are averaged. A final yield figure for a cartridge is therefore derived from the testing of a minimum of nine cartridges.

Unfortunately we don't have the ability to routinely conduct such exhaustive testing, but where we have tested cartridge yields our results have supported the figures quoted by inkjet manufacturers. While ISO/IEC is clearly not perfect – chiefly because it relies on the unrealistic scenario of near-continuous printing – we believe that it produces a fair and consistent indication of ink yield, sufficient that we can use its results to calculate a fair indication of a printer's running costs.

I hope that helps. If you're interested in reading more, HP's website does a pretty good job of explaining both the speed and yield test standards.

Speed: http://www.hp.com/products1/ISO/MMDPP/index.html
Yield: http://h10060.www1.hp.com/pageyield/articles/us/en
/IsoInkjetYield.html

By Simon_Handby on 15 Jul 2012

Works with compatible inks

We use on of these in our office and the great thing is you can use compatible ink cartridges, we use the ones from dinkycartridges.co.uk/ with great results

By markpadam on 2 Jan 2013

Leave a comment

You need to Login or Register to comment.